


our boys make bets

by blueshirts



Category: Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Cuteness galore, Fluff, M/M, accidentally deleted this, i don't actually remember what this is about but it looks sweet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-23
Updated: 2015-03-23
Packaged: 2018-03-19 04:43:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3596766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blueshirts/pseuds/blueshirts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the prompt: Steve and Bucky's first kiss post-CA:tWS. I wrote it, but I had to go back to the very beginning to do their kiss justice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	our boys make bets

It started in Brooklyn, on a fall afternoon, with the sun high in the sky and the shouts of rowdy boys echoing through the city streets. Steve sat alone on a curb with his head cradled in his hand and traced suns and stars in the dust. At least the other boys hadn’t outright told him he couldn’t play with them, was all he could think. They’d only forgotten to call his name when they picked teams. Still, it almost felt worse to be forgotten than to be told to keep on steppin’. Steve sighed, but not too heavily. He didn’t want to mess up his astral design.

He felt a tap on his shoulder and looked up, shielding his eyes from the sun. A brown-haired boy with a gap-toothed smile, a boy he’d only seen glimpses of in the classroom and the cafeteria, was bouncing up and down on his toes on the sidewalk.

"Um—" Steve started, just as the boy shouted

"—Betcha can’t catch me!"

 After waiting the slightest moment to make sure his words sunk in, the gap-toothed boy took off. Steve hefted himself up, stepped carefully around his dust stars, and followed. Soon, it became apparent that the boy was going intentionally slow. He kept speeding up periodically and looking over his shoulder, only to slow down until Steve caught up. That more than anything fueled Steve on. His breath rattled in his lungs and his legs burned but he wanted to catch that jerk and show him that Steve didn’t need anyone slowing down for his sake.

So Steve caught him, right as the boy was turning a corner onto a newer, quieter street, and he punched him square in the jaw.

"Ow!," the boy whined, and prodded gingerly at the sore spot. He winced, though Steve knew his fists weren’t capable of inflicting anything worse than a small bruise. "What’d you do that for?"

Steve’s nostrils flared in the sort of indignance only a child has the heart to muster, “I was only catching you.”

"Well, you didn’t have to do it so hard!" 

For some weird reason, the boy started to laugh. His hand dropped from the reddening welt on his jaw and went to his belly as he doubled over in mirth.

"Why’re you laughing?" Steve asked, his anger forgotten and replaced by curiosity.

The boy wiped a tear from his eye, and answered, “Maybe the other boys don’t play with you ‘cause they’re scared of you.”

Steve frowned, and wondered if he preferred that explanation over any other for his exclusion. He kind of did.

"Are you?" he asked, despite himself.

"Am I what?" The boy straightened up, smiling a new smile, one Steve hadn’t seen yet. This one was less toothy.

"Are you scared of me?" 

"I’m not scared of anything. Not sharks, ghosts, bullies," the boy ticked each off on a finger, "not even you. Hey, what’s your name?"

"Steve Rogers."

The boy offered a hand, dirty and covered in scrapes. Steve took it.

"I’m Bucky Barnes. And I’m not afraid of you, Stevie."

"Aw, don’t call me that," Steve tried to whine. It’s effect was lessened by the expression in his face. He could get used to having friends, he thinks. Especially if they’re all as fun as Bucky.

*

It persisted, even throughout the trials of war, when passion had the tendency to flare and burn out like sparklers lit on the Fourth of July.

Bucky made his way with false bravado towards the back of the transport truck and stuck his head out the flaps of canvas, ignoring Gabe’s protests that the whole point of a covert mission was to be covert. Steve hadn’t yet peeled off to create the explosive, star-spangled diversion, and was still following along on his motorcycle.

Bucky smiled casually at him, though his white-knuckled grasp on the truck flaps belied his nerves.

"Hiya, Cap," Bucky shouted over the sound of the truck on the uneven trail and the quieter rumble of the cycle’s engine.

Steve rolled his eyes at Bucky. He wasn’t going to indulge him, not right then anyways. Not when time was sensitive and he was supposed to be all responsible and leaderly.

"Steve," Bucky said, louder.

"What is it?" 

Bucky held up a finger for patience, then poked his head back in the truck.

"How close are we to the compound?" 

DumDum knocked on the divide between the bed of the truck and the cab and received a prompt answer in some accent Bucky couldn’t parse. Dernier nodded in understanding and relayed the information to Bucky, “It should be in sight within minutes.”

Bucky grinned through his thanks and stuck his head out the flaps again. Steve had driven the cycle dangerously close to the back of the truck, close enough that Bucky could look down and see the uncertainty in his eyes.

"Seriously, Buck. I don’t have all day."

Bucky dropped to his knees, sliding his fingers down the canvas flaps and getting tickled by the imperfections in the fabric. He laughed a little.

"You’re going in too, right?"

Steve frowned, “Eventually.”

Bucky waited a beat, then forged ahead, “Betcha won’t be able to catch up to me.”

The utter ridiculousness of his words escaped Steve, who just smirked in kind. He revved the throttle of his cycle and pointed it towards the side road, to the site of the diversion.

"You’re on!" he shouted over his shoulder, and spared a moment to wave. 

For the first time in all their missions, Bucky was thankful for the dark interior of the cab. His smile had turned all goofy, and he didn’t know how he’d explain it if any of the guys asked. He didn’t know how to even explain it to himself.

*

Bucky Barnes was charming and clever, but he couldn’t evade those who knew him best. The Winter Soldier lacked charm and, for him, efficiency took precedent over cleverness. No one knew him, and no one could find him if he didn’t want to be found. 

Steve ran into the man who was neither Bucky nor the Winter Soldier on the street. Literally ran into him. It happened on another fall day— one not cold enough to necessitate a jacket, even in the late afternoon. Steve had been trying to get a loaf of bread to maintain it’s (precarious) balance atop the rest of his groceries and had thus been too distracted to watch his step. And so, he ran into the man.

The bread fell from it’s perch and Steve cursed, still not seeing what was right in front of him. He made to bend down to pick up the bread, but the man beat him to it. He was faster, and unburdened by an overloaded bag of groceries (unlike Steve). He handed Steve his loaf of bread wordlessly. 

"Thanks," Steve said, grateful, when he got his bread back. Then he dropped everything on the ground all over again.

The man looked down and surveyed the contents of the bag: the scattered vegetables, the granola bars, and the stray carton of Oreo cookies. He looked back up at Steve with wide eyes.

"Sorry," he said, his aloof voice tinged with something else. Anxiety? Fear? While Steve’s mind reeled, his heart ached. He didn’t know what— who— the man feared, but he had to make it clear the man was safe around Steve. But he couldn’t make it clear now, not without coming off as overbearing, so he smiled a small, cautious smile, and shook his head at the man’s apology.

"Fuck the vegetables," he said.

His arms twitched. He so wished to embrace the man with Bucky’s face and the Winter Soldier’s scars, to hold him tight and never let him out of his sight again, but he buried his wish. He gulped and imagined he was swallowing everything he never had the chance to say to Bucky and what he dared not say now. 

"Fuck the vegetables," the man repeated softly, his foreign yet achingly familiar eyes still a bit too wide. He was clearly out of his element, but Steve took it as a good sign that he hadn’t yet bolted. 

Steve shrugged, “Your first Steve Rogers’ Homecooked Meal in ninety-seven years shouldn’t have vegetables anyway.”

"Yeah?" The man smiled at that. Almost. His scowl got less intense. Steve felt like punching the air, but he settled for cleaning up the mess on the ground.

"Yeah. And this time, I’ve got proper ingredients— Here, hold this," he handed the crumpled, but miraculously intact paper bag to the man and started piling in the remains of his grocery haul, "—I mean, everything’s a little bit different. But, God, meat and butter are cheap here."

The man cocked an eyebrow, “God Bless America?”

Steve choked out a laugh. He supposed in such trying times he should take whatever admittedly unexpected levity he could get, though. He smiled a bit wider and placed the last bruised lettuce leaf in the bag. Steve lifted the lid of one of the bins on the street and took advantage of the moment to check out the man as covertly as he could.

He was an intriguing sight, especially for someone as emotionally invested as Steve. His grungy clothes, his hair hacked to a length to long to be called kempt and too short to be held back in a ponytail, and the groceries concealing most of his face… Steve didn’t know what to make out him, not yet. He seemed to be holding himself together, at least.

After they got the bag thrown away, Steve led the man up to his apartment, babbling nonsense about food all the way. By the time they reached his door, the man probably knew more than he ever wanted to know about McDonald’s, GMO’s, and urban farming.

Steve unlocked his door and swung it open, “Well, uh, we’re here,” he gestured lamely. The man looked like he was biting back a laugh and Steve thought that if all he had to do to get the man to smile was to act like a dork, he had this in the bag.

The man went in first, standing stock still in the threshold Steve’s apartment as Steve bounded around, turning on lights and adjusting the thermostat (it was always too cold). 

"Make yourself at home," Steve shouted when he reached the kitchen, and wondered if he should regret saying it. He decided he shouldn’t. It was one of those truths that shouldn’t be hidden.

He unearthed the non-stick pan Clint had gotten him for his birthday and some fatty meat to fry, and got cooking. As soon as the meat was breaded and the oil in the pan was popping, he searched the visible apartment for the man.

He was sitting on a couch in the living room. He was stiff-backed and looked uncomfortable as hell, but maybe that was because the couch was one of those decorative ‘modern’ ones that Steve allowed Tony to furnish his apartment with but had never actually used as a couch before. The man seemed to sense Steve’s eyes upon him, and waved mutely. Steve waved back.

He turned back to the meat, which was by then making angry popping noises. He beamed like a dork as he turned the meat over and it persisted in intensity throughout the preparation and consumption of the meal. 

*

Steve took the man to the park the following morning. Despite Steve’s insistence that he take Steve’s bed, he’d slept on the couch. For someone as tight wound as he seemed to be, it took Steve shaking his shoulders to wake him up. Once he was awake, however, he was alert and jittery. Steve figured there was no place more calming than a park in the morning, before the joggers took to the sideroads and byways and the children were still half-asleep and sated from breakfast.

They walked side-by-side on a path, the man thankfully looking a bit less like a lost ex-assassin fresh from a shower and wearing Steve’s borrowed clothes. Steve was a little taller and broader than him, however. He looked smaller, softer, in clothes a size or two too big. Steve feared with all the aching his heart was doing for this man’s sake, it’d break at any moment. 

They passed an elderly man walking his dog— it was one of those small, fluffy ones that Steve couldn’t remember ever seeing in the ’40s. It was cute, even if it looked more like a stuffed toy than a living thing.

"What should I call you?" Steve asked, breaking the silence that had fallen the moment they stepped foot on the footpath.

The man frowned, his brow furrowed minutely, “Bucky’s fine, I guess.”

"You sure?"

Steve glanced at the man, saw the line of his throat extend as he looked upward at the morning sky tinged with dewy yellow, saw his Adam’s apple bob up and down as he swallowed, saw the moment he made the decision in the set of his jaw.

"Yeah."

Steve glanced back at the path. It opened onto a more open area of the park, with less trees, more grass, a play area for children in the corner, and right next to the play area… 

"Ice cream!" He grinned, and veered away from the path towards the ice cream vendor setting up shop for the day.

"Are you always like this?" Bucky whined, keeping pace even as Steve sped up.

"Like what?" Steve asked distractedly, checking out all the available flavors. Another thing he liked about the twenty-first century: cookie dough ice cream. As far as he was concerned, it was the greatest achievement in culinary history since sliced bread. 

"Like you’re twelve."

Steve looked up from rifling through his wallet to pout at Bucky. He opened his mouth to say something defensive, but was cut off. The ice cream vendor cleared his throat not unkindly, just to remind Steve that ice cream had the tendency to melt and he’d better hurry up if he didn’t want that to happen.

Steve put cash on the counter and grabbed his ice cream cone. He licked it and the pout slid off his face. He couldn’t stay angry at anyone for long, especially when he had ice cream and when the person he was supposed to be angry at was Bucky.

"Did you want some?" Steve asked, because Bucky was staring in his direction with poorly concealed desire. Bucky looked quickly away, his cheeks going red.

"Nah."

Steve narrowed his eyes, but let it go without further comment. He shrugged, and said around a chunk of cookie dough he’d just unearthed, “Maybe some other time.”

They found a bench towards the fringe between the open lawn and the wooded area, out of the sun and the most crowded part, and sat in comfortable silence while Steve finished his ice cream cone.

"I—" Bucky started, then bit his lip. Steve waited for him. "I kept thinking that if y— if anyone cared enough, they’d find me. I convinced myself that if they thought I was worth it, they’d be able to figure out where I was hiding."

Steve winced, out of guilt and a sense of failure greater than any he’d ever felt before, “Christ. I’m sorry, Buck.”

Bucky looked back at him, catching Steve’s eye voluntarily for the first time since he’d shown up outside Steve’s apartment and done a pretty good impression of a human wall. He held Steve’s gaze.

"Don’t apologize to me. Just… don’t. After I got over myself, I found you. I didn’t show myself at first."

Steve smiled, “You followed me, you mean?”

Bucky smiled back, his eyes crinkling, “Like a proper stalker. Anyways, I saw you frantically searching for me and figured I might as well make it a bit easier for you.”

"So you turned up on my doorstep."

"Better to overestimate your stupidity than underestimate it," Bucky said, the Winter Soldier shining through for that brief moment. He rolled his eyes, though, and his smile went a bit find (perhaps that last bit was just Steve’s wishful thinking).

Still, Steve pretended to be wounded. He splayed an open hand on his chest and gasped, “I’m not just a pretty face, you know.”

Bucky broke their record-breaking gaze and looked back down at his fingers intertwined in his lap. Before Steve could worry if he’d crossed some line, he heard Bucky mumble something that sounded suspiciously like, “I know.”

Steve wondered if he’d misheard him, but he dared not ask him to repeat himself. Instead, Steve changed the subject.

"Hey."

"Hey."

"See those kids over there?" Steve pointed at two little boys playing tag, weaving clumsily around the playscape in evasion and search of each other.

"Yeah."

"You remember tag, right?"

"I’m an amnesiac, not a visitor from outer space." Bucky’s eye roll was practically audible. Steve laughed.

"No, I mean… do you remember the way we played it?"

Steve looked back at Bucky and saw him frown as he tried to remember. Steve tried not to mourn the loss of their shared childhood, tried to be better than that, but it was so fucking hard to be unselfish when it came to Bucky. Steve wanted to be his best friend again. He missed being the most important thing in to Bucky more than anything else about his old life, he thought almost bitterly, because he feared he’d never regain that status.

"Sorry," Bucky said, and it sounded like he meant it. "I don’t."

"That’s okay. All you need to know was that I spent most of the time trying to catch you, and you spent most of the time running from me."

"That sounds unfair," Bucky’s frown was still in place.

"Maybe, but I always caught you in the end," Steve nudged Bucky’s shoulder, "and that’s what matters."

Bucky looked like he finally understood something that had been bothering him for awhile. Steve had the feeling it didn’t have much to do with tag.

"I probably let you catch me ‘cause I got bored of all the running," Bucky grumbled, and Steve had to grin.

"Probably. I wasn’t as fast as you back then."

Bucky’s mood abruptly changed from sulky to conspiratorial. He grinned evilly, “You are now.”

"What?" Steve wasn’t following.

"I said, you are now."

Bucky leapt to his feet.

"Betcha can’t catch me," he winked. And then he ran off, into the woods. Steve looked after him for a beat, swept up in the utter ridiculousness of the moment, then hefted himself up and followed.

He suspected Bucky had gone easy on him, for the millionth time. Steve got him cornered against a big oak. He wasn’t sure who was grinning wider, him or Bucky, but he was sure they would both look insane to anyone who passed by.

"Gotcha," he said breathlessly, winded from the chase. He advanced upon Bucky to tag him and win. Then, out of nowhere, Bucky’s leg wrapped around him and Bucky flipped them. Steve was the one pinned to the tree, Bucky’s hands on his chest and Bucky’s face-splitting grin filling up his field of vision.

"No, I got you," Bucky panted.

"That’s not how it works" Steve whined, his breath hitching.

At the same moment, they realized the position they were in. They froze and the only movement between the two of them was the intermingling of their exhalations in the fall morning. Bucky’s eyes darted to Steve’s lips. Without any real intention of doing so, Steve licked his lips.

Bucky surged forward, only pausing millimeters before reaching Steve. He searched Steve’s eyes, asking for permission, and that just wouldn’t do. Steve tilted his head just right, closing the divide between them and connecting his lips to Bucky’s.

Their kiss was chaste, and probably only lasted for a moment or two. Steve heard a bird call, and another one answer, but all that was muted by the blood rushing to his ears. Bucky’s lips were cracked and rough. His stubble was scratchy against Steve’s cleanshaven skin. He smelled of Steve’s soap and, oddly, motor oil. Steve committed all these sensations to memory, to cherish forever.

They broke apart, and Steve laughed breathily, a bundle of nerves and anticipation.

"I’m guessing we didn’t do that before," Bucky murmured, his breath a kiss in it’s own right against Steve’s tingling lips.

"No," Steve admitted, "but we should’ve."


End file.
